Beate Zschäpe charged with nine racially motivated murders in country's highest-profile trial since second world war
The string of murders shook Germany but remained unsolved for years, eventually revealing an underground Nazi cell and raising questions about the competence of the German intelligence services.
Now the surviving member of a neo-Nazi gang accused of carrying out nine racially motivated murders and the killing of a policewoman will go on trial on Monday in one of the country's highest-profile court cases since the second world war.
Beate Zschäpe is charged with complicity in the murder of eight Turkish people, a Greek and a German policewoman, as well as involvement in 15 bank robberies and two nail bombings. Other charges include arson, founding a terrorist organisation and facilitating robbery. The 38-year-old will be joined in the dock by four others who have been charged with assisting the group.
But though the spotlight falls on Zschäpe, the trial is also expected to raise serious questions about the German intelligence agency that failed to detect the National Socialist Underground (NSU), which operated undetected for 13 years, carrying out its killings between 2000 and 2007.
Its existence only came to the attention of authorities in November 2011 by chance, after Zschäpe's alleged accomplices Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt committed suicide in a joint pact after a bank robbery went wrong. Police found the Ceska pistol used to murder all their victims in their torched caravan in the eastern town of Eisenach.
A DVD in which the NSU introduced itself and its militant racial hatred policy was also found. In it the bodies of the murder victims are shown, while a Pink Panther figure adds up the number that have been killed. The group claimed responsibility for the killings in the film.
Zschäpe subsequently set fire to the flat the trio had shared in Zwickau, 112 miles away, and fled, turning herself in to police four days later.
The discovery of the cell only in 2011, despite the fact a bomb-making factory had been found in Zschäpe's garage as far back as 1998, sparked a lengthy catalogue of accusations as to how and why the authorities had failed to seize the group.
Police and intelligence agents have been charged with everything from carrying out amateurish investigations, failing to share information with each other, having a firmly rooted apathy towards the far-right threat as well as a general disregard of the victims because they were foreign.
"The really terrible thing," said Hans-Christian Ströbele of the Green party and a deputy member of the parliamentary NSU committee that has been investigating the authorities' failures, "is that while information about the NSU was known again and again, it was not pursued. Huge mistakes were made – in short, it was a huge failure".
The federal and domestic intelligence agencies have been reshuffled since details of the bungled investigation, which Chancellor Angela Merkel referred to as a "disgrace" for Germany, started emerging. Before the cell came to light, investigators had seen little reason to pursue the line that the murders might have been racially motivated, concentrating instead on what they suspected was a connection to organised crime within immigrant circles – a suspicion that turned out to be groundless.
Many of the victims' families have avoided media attention. But the most vocal, Semiya Simsek, wrote a book about the murder of her father, Enver Simsek. A shepherd's son from the Taurus mountains in southern Turkey, Simsek emigrated to Germany in search of a better life in 1986 and set up as a flower seller. The 39-year-old was gunned down at close range in the back of his delivery van in Nuremberg, southern Germany, in September 2000, in what was the first in a string of killings that were dubbed the "doner murders" by the media.
"I will be looking closely at how Germany conducts the trial," Simsek, who will be one of the joint plaintiffs, said in an interview. Her book accuses the police of trying to implicate her father in criminal activity, and says the Simsek family felt they were treated like suspects rather than victims of a horrific crime.
Other victims included other businessmen – eight of them Turks, and one Greek – and a policewoman.
"I feel like the neo-Nazis shot him [but] the German authorities killed him a second time," Simsek said.
More embarrassment was heaped onto German authorities last month with the discovery of a sophisticated network of far-right prisoners. The network, whose members have communicated with a secret code undetected by prison authorities, has repeatedly attempted to contact Beate Zschäpe, who has become something of a heroine of the far-right scene.
A case of this scale has rarely been seen in Germany. Sigmar Gabriel, leader of the Social Democrats, called the case a "farce", saying it had damaged Germany's image abroad, making it "the laughing stock of the world".
The trial is expected to last about two years.
Battle for media seats causes diplomatic row
Media places for the NSU trial have been allocated by lottery after the first attempt to distribute the 50 seats set aside for journalists on a first-come-first-served basis led to no Turkish or Greek journalists gaining access – despite the fact that eight of the NSU's alleged victims were of Turkish origin, one of Greek. It created a diplomatic row between Berlin and Athens.
But the subsequent decision to delay the trial by three weeks to introduce a complex lottery involving three groups, each with several sub-categories (but with no online provision), has been yet more controversial.
A huge media furore was prompted after major newspapers and television outlets – including state TV channel ZDF, the dailies Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and Die Welt – failed to secure seats. In contrast, several small local radio stations and a women's fashion magazine got lucky.
Neither was there to have been an English-language representative at the trial until the German press agency DPA offered last week to relinquish one of its places to news agency Reuters.
Suggestions to the court by politicians and experts that it either move the trial to a larger court or install a television screen outside the courtroom – similar to the process adopted at the 2012 trial of the Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik – were dismissed as unconstitutional.
Several journalists have lodged complaints with Germany's highest court but these were not expected to delay the trial's start. The court has brushed off the journalists' criticism, justifying the lottery procedure by arguing it had "weighed up which process would best ensure equal chances for all".
Asked why it had not simply put a few more chairs into the courtroom, the court official added: "that would have entailed a whole new procedure just for the Turkish journalists over who got those seats and other journalists would then have complained".
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